guangzhou

we got to guangzhou and these hotel touts super harassed us til we finally gave in and they found us a room for 120 yuan per night. not an awesome value. but good enough. there were some shady characters staying in the hotel. the kind of guys that own pawn shops and sell jewelry. and lots of them. i'm not sure what they were doing there. but they didn't bother us at all. the highlight of this town was the food we found around our hotel. we got fried noodles and fried rice from a street stall for 5 yuan each. so good. the next day we went to shamian island, where white people adopt chinese babies. they have to stay there a month to adopt. i was pretty disappointed to only see one white lady with her brand new chinese baby. but we did see a man doing tai chi, so that was exciting. we found a man selling bao 2 for 1 yuan. that's like the best deal ever. bao is a steamed bun that can have different fillings inside. sooo good. we had more noodles again that night!
we left there for guilin, which is supposed to have 'stunning limestone karst topography'. i didn't know what karst was til i read the lonely planet. i think it just means tall skinny mountains coming out of the ground. we stayed at a hostel and ate some delicious street food (my goodness i love street food. so much cheaper and better). we went to see the reed flute cave, which is really touristy. and foo translated the chinese tour going on. part of it was 'it's cold and damp in here so if you stay too long you get rheumatism.' she then added 'chinese people believe stuff like that'. this is how nance explains chinese culture to me. later on a bus ride she explained more about culture like this: 'when we were coming to china there were stores on the road selling bear ball (meaning testicle) powder.' me: 'what would you do with bear ball powder?' foo: 'probably people take it because they think it makes you fuck like a large animal. chinese people would think that.' so are the cultural lessons i am given...
back to the cave. it was pretty neat and had lots of stalactites and stalagmites. i guess that's about all. we went to another town called yangshuo and failed to do anything touristy at all. we had planned to, but just didn't feel like it. we walked around, lazed in bed, ate some noodles. lots of noodles.
we headed back to guangzhou on the 6:45am bus. we had a train to catch at 8:22am, and the bus ride was supposed to be about an hour and 20 mins. so we get there and run to the street, jump in a cab get out and run to the station. go through security (and no one likes lines, which made it rough) and i pushed a small child out of the way (this is what china does to me). we ran up to the waiting area and right as we got to the door the woman locked it. we missed the train. and so did about 10 other people. fortunately we were able to change to a later train at no charge. so we waited in the station for about 5 hours. got on a 1:22 train. and we met the nicest girl ever on this train! her name is zou peng, and she chatted up foo the whole ride. 5 or 6 hours. and she gave us delicious snacks and is now foo's email buddy. she confirmed what we had been told by the crazy man on the last train that we had been getting way overcharged for our you tiao and soymilk. haha. i'm not totally sure what else they talked about but the girl seemed very nice. and we got to nanning! our last stop before heading into viet nam!